


Oh, Calamity!

by brokenbeauty



Series: Don't Panic [1]
Category: Free!
Genre: First Kiss, M/M, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-02
Updated: 2017-02-02
Packaged: 2018-09-21 17:48:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9560189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brokenbeauty/pseuds/brokenbeauty
Summary: Is everything that builds up meant to fall apart?





	

**Author's Note:**

> Man oh man this is my second year writing for Rin's birthday. I feel old XD Well, third year in this fandom, here I come. As always, HAPPY BIRTHDAY MY SWEET PRINCE and enjoy!

_When I was younger I was certain that I’d be fine without a queen._

He’s tired.

It’s all he can think of, even as he brushes Nagisa off for the millionth time, _Haru-chan, tell us about your girlfriend,_ and sighs. Looks out of the window. Idly toys with the thought of asking Nagisa exactly what he find so attractive about long hair and soft bodies and high voices.

Because female companionship doesn’t matter. Never had, to him; not in boys-chase girls on snow-filled playgrounds and not later, when his classmates had waxed eloquent about _hair_ and _eyes_ and _skin._

He gets up from where they’re eating lunch. A toss of his head, a stare his classmates called _cold,_ and that had ended for him the tiresome quota of female attention.

But then _he’d_ come along, a sakura hurricane with no concept of boundaries, and he tries not to think about that too much; not admit, even to himself, that maybe he’d never be interested in anyone else.

 

_Just a king inside his castle, with an ocean in between._

When he’s walking home with Makoto later, he stares. Because in this world of his, in this abyss stained azure and cobalt and ultramarine, every stray need he’s ever felt for camaraderie has been filled by this person. The shimmering green, bridging every cavern that’s ever opened up between himself and the world of dizzying possibilities with its unquestioning kindness. He stares, and he thinks about how Makoto, with the setting sun glinting gold in his hair, bronzing his skin into luminousness, is so much like the calm lapping of waves against sand, with its knack of handling self-willed creatures of the ocean.

Isolation is by force of habit for him, now. And it’s a sight better than being told what to do by people he couldn’t care less about. Maybe the reason their relationship had survived this long was because i8t had never taken on that dynamic.

_And maybe that’s why the other one hadn’t._

He keeps staring.

 _What,_ Makoto asks after a while, hand at the back of his head. Discomfited. And Haruka turns his head and says nothing.

 

_Now all I do is sit and count the miles from you to me._

Later still, after dusk has fallen and after he’s shrugged off the invitation to dinner, he’s alone in his room. And he finds himself thinking.

Thinking about _him,_ the him with danger in his eyes and a blitzkrieg of phantom emotion trailing behind him like a shadow. And he thinks of how far they’ve come since that day ensconced in a whirlwind of sakura-snow, since the sight he’d never seen before.

Since Rin had just up and left.

And the wound still festers, he realizes like the rush of water into a shallow pool; when the only question he can ask himself, hands clenching into involuntary fists, is whether that movement has been forward or backwards.

_He could go see him right now._

He turns the idea over in his mind, the idle planning for something he’d never do. He imagines buying a train ticket, getting on the last train to Samezuka.

And Rin’s face when he sees him.

 

_Oh, calamity._

_We get older by the hour, watch the changes from afar._

His muscles burn.

For what feels like the umpteenth time, he grunts, pulls himself up. Relishing it, almost, as the cold metal of the pull-up bar gradually warms under his exertions. He glances at his arms with a sort of morbid satisfaction as they tense and strain, _hold five seconds, leave._

Again.

_Again_

_Againagainagain_

His brain detaches from his body. There is only his music, then, and the single-minded focus of an approaching goal— _ten more, five, one._

When he finally leaves off, flops gracelessly onto his back against the cool, synthetic matting on the floor, his biceps are screaming and his chest is heaving. He turns his head, looks into the mirrored walls, and sighs.

He’s different.

He wouldn’t call himself a narcissist, not in any sense as he understands it, but he’s _grown._ The childishness of his body replaced by pure muscle, the childishness of his ideals replaced by determination.

His stupid sentimentality replaced by detachment throwing away that trophy.

It’s what he’s always wanted. Isn’t it?

_Isn’t it?_

_Keep forgetting to remember, where we’ve been is who we are._

It’s long after lights out and he’s walking back to his dorm when it hits him.

He’s alone.

The situation itself isn’t extraordinary, what with his stringent training regime and general demeanor ensuring that most of his classmates keep well out of his way.  But it’s quiet, eerily so, as he’s walking. And that in itself isn’t as discomfiting as the realization that the loneliness makes him uncomfortable.

 _And it’s all because you’ve thrown it all away,_ something at the back of his head reminds him. His face twists into a grimace and his fists clench. And he hears the ghost of Nagisa’s laughter, of Makoto’s wheedling, of Haruka’s silence somewhere off into the distance. Thinks about when he _belonged,_ too, a little kid half in love with everyone and everything around him.

But he doesn’t, any more. And that’s what’s important.

_He’s outgrown them._

He shuts his eyes.

 

_Now all I do is wonder why we ever set the scene._

When he reaches his dorm, he throws himself down on his bed, ignoring Nitori’s sleepy greeting, and buries his face into the pillow. His muscles ache, and his head throbs, but he’s nowhere near sleep. And it’s always _this,_ when the lights are out and there’s nothing to distract him from his own racing thoughts that he traverses into dangerously maudlin territory. And it’s always _now,_ that he’s hopeless and forlorn and torn somewhere between where he _should_ belong and where he does, that the one question he fights so desperately to suppress, emerges.

 _Was it,_ was it _worth it?_

All of it, staring at the carnage now of friendship and love and hatred and anger _(and Haruka and Rin),_ but is the blood on his hands anyone’s but his own?

 

_Oh, calamity._

_It’s such a shame that we play strangers, no act to change what we’ve become._

He turns over in his bed. The memory of that winter day will not leave his mind. Rin’s face when he’s lost to him, his bowed-out form and his tremulous voice. And maybe he hates him for it, a little bit, the way he’d said he’d quit swimming and taken everything out of his world in one fell swoop.

But maybe it’s just that Rin is too volatile, too changeable for the stability of the little world he has built up around himself.

Even now, when he thinks of amalgamation, he thinks of _him_ , his pure, bright crimson deepening into bruised carmine, like what burns so bright in his own memory never happened in Rin’s. Like he hates him now and there’s nothing he can do about it. And it makes him shudder despite himself, because it is disagreeable but also intriguing, and he hates that a little, too.

_He can’t sleep._

Not when the blood moon out his window is the exact shade of Rin’s eyes when he’d last seen them, clouded as they had been with something he recoils from calling indifference. Not when indifference is so alien to the Rin he remembers with all guns blazing crimson; traversing boundaries left, right and center with that disarming smile and those eyes that had looked as ready to spill over with tears as with mirth.

And not when the change in him rankles, and yet, somehow, _entices._

He doesn’t want to, but he’s thinking about it. Has been latently thinking about it since the night at their old swim club. About how the childish body has grown into its skin, taller than him, even, perhaps and moving with the fluid grace of some predatory animal.

And suddenly, he imagines kissing Rin and wonders if he’ll bite.

He gets up and walks to his window, almost dazed. The slight breeze is cool against his face, his dry lips, and they part, soundlessly.

 

_Damn, it’s such a shame that we built a mess out of me._

 

It could have been ten minutes, and it could have been an hour.

It doesn’t matter. _It doesn’t matter,_ he tells himself. Even as the nervous energy thrums under his skin, even as the knowledge that something is fundamentally _wrong_ gnaws and itches with all the potency of a fresh wound. And he _knows,_ he knows what it is, exactly, even when he won’t admit it to himself.

He jerks upright in bed. Drives a fist into the mattress next to him. Curses under his breath.

Damn him.

_Damn Haruka._

It’s making him nauseous, the unrest inside him. The grueling day awaiting him, the alarm set to ring at an ungodly hour. All of it.

And yet. Here he is, thinking thoughts in his head that will not let him sleep.

_What has he become?_

He wants to punch something that won’t give, vent the discomfiture skittering like bugs over him, but he can’t risk making a racket without waking Nitori and having to face the Spanish Inquisition.

He needs to do _something,_ or he might just explode, so he gets out of bed, shrugs on a jacket with unsteady fingers.

And he bolts.

 

_Oh, Calamity._

_I’ll remember nights alone, and waking up to dial tones._

Inexplicably, he checks his phone. He can’t remember the last time he looked through it, but the screen still lights up with a dim glow when he flips it open. There’re texts from Makoto, predictably, a _did you eat dinner_ and a _good night,_ both dated a few days ago. Some spam, picture messages from Nagisa.

And nothing else.

He doesn’t know what he’s expecting, really, when the last texts from him are over three years old. But he also knows exactly what he’s expecting when he has to make a conscious effort to prevent himself from scrolling upwards and re-reading every single one of them.

And just because he’s alone doesn’t mean he has to be lonely. It’s what he tells himself, even as his finger hovers over the call button.

 

_Always found my greatest moments in the sounds of your hellos._

When he’s out, outside the dorm, outside the building, outside the campus, _out out out,_ only then does he stop running. Doubling over, hands on his knees, catching his breath.

And thinking.

It’s a cold night, but he feels like he’s overheating in the midst of his roiling, warring thoughts and emotions. His heart is burning a hole into his chest, and he kind of wants to rip it out and hurl it into the blue distance. And yet he wants to run more, run run run like he can’t stop. Run though his feet are full of scars, run until he ends up at Iwatobi, until he ends up at Haruka’s doorstep.

And what would Haruka do, then? Say, then? Would he even be surprised? Or would he be subjected to that same apathy which always feels like Haruka knows uncomfortable things about him?

It comes back to him, his voice, the sound that’s gone and settled in the marrow of his bones like the scent of blood. Just that side of deeper in the intervening three years at that godforsaken swim club where he’d met him last.

Something prickles at the back of his neck. It’s always been so _powerful,_ the way he’s said his name.

It makes him want to admit to everyone but himself how fragile his bulwarks really are.

 

_Now I struggle to recall the reasons you would come to leave._

He presses it.

He presses the call button.

Later, he would swear to himself that it was slip of his trembling fingers, but _mistakes,_ something tells him, don’t stand frozen in a kind of breathless horror as the phone rings, obnoxiously loud, once, twice, before Rin picks up.

And then _hello,_ Rin says, and it all goes blank as he’s convinced, once and for all, that this was the furthest thing possible from an accident. And he’s saying it again, a bit more insistently, but Haruka’s mouth is dry as sawdust. The relief has caught him unawares in its intensity, in its unexpectedness.

He suddenly wants to scream into the phone. Make Rin’s hair stand on end as he does the demanding for once, _why why why_ and _what was more important than this._ But he’s heaving in gulps of air like he’s just finished a losing race, and his voice seems to have died somewhere within that. The call cuts off before he knows it.

He fights the urge to call again, sets his phone down and tries to steady his breathing. A flare of annoyance lights within him as he realizes that mere implication— _nostalgia_ makes it sound like too much of a good thing—has him worked up like his.

 _But then again,_ he lets out a resigned sigh, palm against the windowpane, _hadn’t it always been like that with him?_

The rasp of Rin’s voice lingers and the _implication_ of it makes him hot all over. He tells himself it’s from sheer irritation, and maybe it is, but it’s largely irritation at himself.

Unbidden, he imagines finding himself in Rin’s bed. A gasp, and suddenly the half-formed images in his mind take shape. Rin on top of him, under him. Heated and aggressive and _wanting._ Rin stroking him to completion until the only thing on his mind, on his lips, is the monosyllabic name.

A brief, hot flash of Rin _inside_ him.

He shakes his head to clear it. There’s grit crawling under his skin, and he can’t shake the feeling of foreboding.

 

_Oh, calamity._

_It’s such a shame that we play strangers, no act to change what we’ve become._

For a full minute, he stares at his phone in disbelief. Breath sounding unnaturally loud in its rush from his lungs long after the glow of the screen fades.

 _Unknown number,_ it had said, and his fingers had scrambled to the receive button with an urgency he hadn’t cared to acknowledge.

And fuck, maybe it’s a total shot in the dark, but _fuck_ he knows it had been him. Couldn’t have been anyone else with the way the labored breathing had sounded on the other end of the line, the breathing he’s heard a million and one times in the lane next to his.

Maybe he’s overestimating his cognitive faculties. But it makes him flush so instantly and so deep it’s unfair when he realizes he wants to call back.

And _fuck_ he hates it. Hates it so much it sends a burning behind his eyes and makes his body seize up. He shouldn’t want anything to do with him. And he finds himself sinking into the abyss between _shouldn’t want_ and calling back, gathering up and treasuring every sound Haruka makes of validation.

But what then?

What when he’s run out of things to be angry about?

Any actual words he wants to say will disappear into the chasm that’s only grown deeper between them over the years, and doesn’t he know it. They’ll fumble at some farce of normalcy, he’ll hang up, and that’ll be the end of it.

And he doesn’t know what he wants. Whether it’s _that_ or something else altogether, but it seems like his instinct has already decided for him as his feet angle in the direction of the station and he takes off running.

 

_Damn, it’s such a shame that we built a mess out of me._

He’s _hot._

It’s almost a feverish heat, making his head feel fuzzy and his limbs move sluggishly. And he can concentrate on nothing. It’s almost like it’s tantalizing him, this heat with the promise of culmination so distant and yet so concrete in his mind. He can read books, sketch, pace around the house all he wants, but it will not go away. His brow is slick with sweat, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps, and he’s _throbbing._

And the worst part is, he knows exactly what’s causing it.

He’s heard of this phenomenon before, he realizes sometime around the fifth time his eyes have scanned the same sentence in _Famous Japanese Hot Springs and I._ It had come up before, somewhere in his biology class.

_Heat._

Maybe it’s impossible for him, maybe it only happens to animals, but he _feels_ like one, now, panting and sticky and crimson, crimson, crimson. And if he’d thought that Rin had been feeding on his sanity before, it was nothing compared to what’s happening to him now. His throat is scratchy, dry, and his mouth in juxtaposition is wet with saliva. Every brush of wind against his skin his mind turns into the touch of callused fingers.

And he wants to cry. Feels like he’s sick and the remedy half a world away and forbidden into the bargain. Feels like he wants to lash out at the cause, turn his face and push him away, and yet pull him closer as can be.

He needs a bath.

 

_Oh, calamity._

_If I catch you on the corner, will you even know it’s me?_

By the time he reaches Iwatobi, he’s shaking violently, sick with anticipation coiling in his gut and mind racing in overdrive. The scenarios in his head are getting more pessimistic by the minute even as he tells himself he won’t be turned away.

Doesn’t think he can take it.

But his feet move on autopilot, tracing the path from memory even as his head repeats a mantra of _you can still go back._

 _Nothing will be different,_ he’s breaking into a run as he passes Makoto’s house.

 _He’ll never know if you turn back now,_ he’s forgoing the doorbell in favor of sharp, feverish knocks on the door, the sick feeling intensifying now that he’s sealed his own fate, and the blood roars in his ears to the tune of Haruka, Haruka, _Haruka._

It’s intoxicating music.

 

_Will I look familiar to you, do you offer me a seat?_

He thinks he’s imagining it at first.

He’s pacing, trying to calm own to the comforting rush of bathwater filling the tub, and it’s working to some extent, breath evening out as he paces it to running water.

But then he hears it. A series of hurried taps at his door, and he freezes, heart rate spiking so quickly it makes him dizzy.

Maybe it’s an owl.

But he _knows,_ with the way the heat returns, with the way all thoughts of propriety fleet to air as rushes down the hallway to his door, that he doesn’t believe that.

Doesn’t even want to.

And if it _is,_ by some impossible, inconceivable circumstance, it _is_ him, then, well, what on earth should he do?

His hands are trembling, _trembling_ as he fumbles with the lock, half willing it to stay, stay and protect him from what is certain to lay him bare.

But then it gives.

And then it gives.

 

_Can we find a new beginning, do you turn the other cheek?_

 

The door clicks open and his heart gives a painful lurch in his chest before it stops altogether.

Because now the door is open and Haruka ( _Haruka)_ is standing before him, looking like he feels. Flush high on his cheeks, eyes like a cornered animal’s—and— _fuck_ he’s beautiful.

And _where did that come from,_ before he can dwell on it too much, their eyes are meeting and catching and every other thought leaves his mind and every other sound leaves his lips.

He gets a moment of that defibrillating contact, _Haru,_ the choked whisper leaving his lips, and then Haruka is falling, falling forward.

The first brush of their skin is electric.

Rin can’t hold back a gasp, a full-body shudder when he moves to catch him. The motion feels oddly fluid, like he’s been _meant_ to do this, and yet he marvels at how hot Haruka’s body is against the chill of the air settling on his skin.

 _Rin,_ Haruka breathes, and it sets him thinking in ways he didn’t know he could think in.

Because the concept of _Haruka_ had always been amorphous fantasy for him, and it’s now that he realizes, holding him here on this doorstep with the world dead to them, how much he’s underestimated the prize in favor of the chase. Because the thrill of their dance around each other could never compare to actually having him in the here and now, and there’s only one thing for it now, isn’t there.

There’s only one way this can end.

Haruka’s already tilting his head up, and now that Rin’s thinking about it, he’s _thinking_ about it and his blood is running hot because he can’t think of anything else. His vision is tunneling to just dark hair and limpid eyes and the air alive with volatility between them.

And then his hands are cupping Haruka’s face in a trembling grip and he’s closing the distance between them, diving in.

And it feels like taking a breath.

He chases for more, more _more_ of that liberating feeling, hungry, devouring even as Haruka pulls him inside the house, his lead inexorable. It feels like breaking through water at the end of the last spurt when his hand slaps against the wall and like nothing else all at once.

And _something_ in Haruka’s grip, something in the set of his mouth over his own promises him, this time, a sight he’s never seen before.

 

_Oh, calamity._

_Come back to me._

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> IF YOU GOT THE BTS REFERENCE I SWEAR TO GOD


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